Soulmask Server Requirements: RAM, CPU and Player Slots

The official requirement and what it really means

The developer guidance for Soulmask dedicated servers is clear on the important part: one game process needs at least 16GB of memory and 2-4 CPU cores. One map equals one process, so Cloud Mist Forest and Shifting Sands are not two checkboxes inside the same lightweight server. Each map has its own launch script, its own memory footprint, its own ports and its own save data, on either Linux or Windows.

That official 16GB line is why most renters should treat 16GB as the safe choice, but it does not mean a 12GB plan is automatically impossible. Soulmask hosts put the server at about 11-12GB just to start, and usage climbs from there as the world develops. That is why a small private world can run on 12GB, and why most hosts tell busier servers to expect 16GB or more. The catch is headroom. If the server has almost no spare memory after startup, it has nowhere to put world growth, more NPC state, larger saves or the known memory leak, so the plan may look fine at launch and become unstable later.

Do not mix this up with the Steam store page for the game client. The store lists 16GB minimum and 24GB recommended for players’ PCs, plus 25GB storage, and those figures are for running the game on a local machine, not for hosting the dedicated server process.

The rest of the official numbers matter too: about 20GB free disk space, roughly 100 kbps per player in both directions, and two UDP ports per process. The game port is 8777 and the Steam query port is 27015. The telnet maintenance port 18888 is for local use and does not need to be opened publicly. If you are deciding between renting and using spare hardware at home, read our self-hosting explainer before you assume a spare desktop can carry an older persistent world without babysitting.

Here is what that looks like once the server has booted. The orange part is what the process needs before anyone has done much; the dark part is what is left for everything that happens afterwards.

Also keep normal startup time in mind. Soulmask can take 2-5 minutes to start and appear in the browser, so a slow first boot is not automatically a crash.

What actually uses the resources

Soulmask is sized by world activity, not by a sales-page slot count. The server is continuously simulating persistent state, writing that state to disk, and sending updates to connected players. What matters is not only how many people are online, but how much the world contains and how much AI it has to think about every tick.

The load matrix below shows which world features mainly hit RAM, main-thread CPU, disk or bandwidth.

• Players: every online player adds movement, inventory state, combat state, crafting activity and network updates. That costs RAM for live state, CPU for simulation, and bandwidth for position and world updates. If usage rises mainly during peak hours and falls back when people leave, players are a real part of the load.
• Recruited tribesmen: this is the big one people underestimate. Every recruited tribesman means more pathfinding, task logic and state checks every tick. That is mostly main-thread CPU, with extra RAM for persistent NPC data. If performance gets worse when people bring workers or guards into play, AI is usually the reason.
• Bases and placed objects: large settlements mean more structures, containers and other placed objects for the server to keep track of, save and revisit. That raises RAM use and increases tick work around those areas. If lag is much worse near one base than everywhere else, the base itself is often the problem.
• World age: an older world tends to carry more persistent state. More bases, more NPCs, more stored items and more accumulated database contents mean higher memory use at boot, longer saves and more chance that a plan which felt fine at the start will later feel cramped.
• Saves and backups: writing the world database to disk costs I/O and can cause short hitches, especially on a busy persistent world. More frequent saves reduce rollback risk after a crash, but they create more frequent write bursts.
• The memory leak: Soulmask servers are known to creep upward in RAM use over time, even with nobody online. This does not usually show up as immediate lag. It shows up as a server that was fine after a restart and later starts refusing joins or crashing near the plan limit.

The important consequence is simple: two servers with the same slot cap can need very different plans. A quiet low-build world with few tribesmen can be light, while a smaller group with aggressive recruitment and one huge settlement can be much heavier.

How much RAM a Soulmask server needs by group size

Buy for the world you expect in a month, not the empty map on day one. Player count is a starting point; how many tribesmen your group recruits and how big the settlements get decide where in each band you land.

The reason tribesmen can matter as much as players is that they keep the world busy even when the player count looks modest. Six people with a large recruited workforce can load the server harder than a bigger group with simple settlements and fewer active NPCs. If you want the broader logic behind headroom, ageing sandbox worlds and why dedicated servers rarely scale in a neat line with slot counts, our general hardware requirements explainer covers that background.

CPU: why fast cores beat more cores

The official guidance asks for 2-4 cores per process, and the reason it stops there is that a Soulmask server is not a pile of separate jobs that spread neatly across many cores. Much of the important work is the live world simulation: movement, combat, AI decision-making, interaction checks and structure state. That sort of work has a busy path every tick, so once the world gets active, the quality of the fastest core matters more than adding idle cores the process cannot use efficiently.

Extra cores still help. They give the operating system, networking, save tasks and other background work room to breathe, and they matter if the same machine is hosting several processes. But for one busy map, better per-core performance is what players tend to feel first. Large bases and recruited tribesmen both add more work to each tick, so CPU trouble usually shows up when people gather in developed areas or when many NPCs are active at once.

How CPU trouble looks different from RAM trouble

• CPU-bound server: rubber-banding, delayed interactions and worse performance near specific settlements or during busy hours. The server often stays online, but the world feels sluggish.
• RAM-bound server: steadily rising memory use, failed joins, sudden crashes or a process that becomes unreliable after long uptime even when nobody is doing much.

If a change really helped CPU pressure, you should notice fewer hitches around active tribesmen and big bases without much change to idle memory use. If memory was the real limit, CPU symptoms may stay similar but crashes and refused connections stop after adding headroom or restarting more sensibly.

Player slots do not size the server

Soulmask ships with a player cap of 20 in Engine.ini. That number only decides how many people can be online at once. It does not reserve any memory or CPU for them.

[Dedicated.Settings]
MaxPlayers=20

You can raise or lower that limit with -MaxPlayers, and Soulmask hosts document a ceiling of 70 players per server. That does not mean a busy 70-slot world will run on the same RAM as a tidy 20-slot private world. Slots only decide how many people may attempt to join; the real load still comes from active players, NPC crews, base sprawl, world age and uptime.

Bandwidth is the least confusing part once you do the arithmetic from the official figure. At about 100 kbps per player each way, 6 players use about 0.6 Mbps, 20 use about 2 Mbps, 40 use about 4 Mbps and 70 use about 7 Mbps each way. In practice that means bandwidth is rarely the thing that forces an upgrade. RAM and CPU are the usual constraints.

If you are comparing one plan sold by slots with another sold by memory, our slots vs RAM pricing explainer is the useful way to decode the sales pitch. For Soulmask, the safer buying rule is to choose enough RAM for the world you expect, then set the slot cap conservatively until you see how the world behaves under real use.

Disk space, saves and clean shutdowns

The server package itself is only about 1-2GB, but the official guidance asks for about 20GB of free disk space. That room goes on updates, the live world database and the backup copies that pile up over time. Disk is rarely the first bottleneck, but running short of space is how backups quietly stop working.

The main files worth knowing are WS/Saved/Worlds/Dedicated/Level01_Main/world.db for the world database and WS/Saved/Logs/WS.log for startup and error clues. Those paths matter because “it crashed” is vague; the log timing often tells you whether the fault happened during startup, save, backup or a period of heavy AI load.

The shipped defaults are saving=600 (game objects written to the database every 10 minutes) and backup=900 (the database written to disk every 15 minutes). A crash can therefore cost up to 10 minutes of play. Lowering the save interval to 300 means less progress can be lost in a crash, but it also means more frequent database writes, which can create more noticeable hitches on a busy old world. That trade-off is worth making on some private servers and not worth making on others; the point is to understand that you are exchanging smoother uptime for a shorter rollback window.

Backups also take disk space over time, so do not think only about the live database. Keep an eye on retained backup copies, and use a sensible retention routine rather than hoarding every file forever. If you want the broader housekeeping side of that, our game server backups guide covers the maintenance habits that stop save folders becoming a mess.

For shutdowns on your own machine, connect with telnet to 127.0.0.1 18888 and send quit 180. On a rented server, the panel’s Stop button does the same job. A clean shutdown gives the process time to finish writing the world; closing the window directly is how you end up with a rollback after the restart.

Two maps and clusters: treat them as two full servers

Soulmask has two maps, Level01_Main for Cloud Mist Forest and DLC_Level01_Main for Shifting Sands. One process hosts one map. If you want both maps available with character travel between them, you are building a cluster, not stretching one server a bit further.

That cluster needs a main server using -serverid and -mainserverport to manage player accounts, plus the client map servers that connect to it. The practical consequence is easy to miss: each map is still a full process with its own memory, CPU load, ports, save behaviour and restart schedule. If the main server is offline, the client servers stop working properly. Changing a server ID after players have joined can also cut them off from their characters.

So the budgeting rule is simple: both maps mean two full server allocations, not one plan with a small add-on. If your group only needs one map, keep one process and keep the budget simple.

Keeping a right-sized server stable

Schedule a daily restart for the memory leak

Soulmask has a known memory leak, so a scheduled daily restart in off-peak hours is normal maintenance, even on a generously sized plan. What the restart actually does is reset the process before leaked allocations can climb to the plan limit. The trade-off is obvious: a short daily interruption. The benefit is that you stop “fine yesterday, dead today” behaviour before it starts. You can tell it worked if memory drops back after each restart and stays safely below the limit until the next one.

Trim tribesmen limits before you buy a bigger plan

The highest-impact tuning usually lives in WS/Saved/GameplaySettings/GameXishu.json. These are the defaults:

{
  "GeRenMaxZhaoMuCount": 6,
  "GongHuiMaxZhaoMuCount": 50,
  "ManRenChuZhanCount": 3
}

Lowering those values works because it cuts the number of recruited NPCs the server has to keep alive in memory and process every tick for pathfinding and task logic. The trade-off for players is fewer workers, guards or travelling companions. If that change helps, you should see fewer peak-hour stalls and less area lag when multiple people have tribesmen active.

The other habit that matters is observation. Do not judge a plan only by the first evening after launch. Watch memory after boot, after a busy session and just before the next scheduled restart for several days. That tells you whether the plan is merely booting or actually carrying the world cleanly.

What 12GB+ plans cost

If you have decided you need 12GB or more, these are the regular monthly prices of the cheapest plans that start at that size, rather than plans you would have to upgrade straight away.

See the full Soulmask host comparison with all 40 hosts, UK locations, backups and refund terms.

Is it RAM, CPU or something else? Troubleshooting by symptom

Use the flow below to separate RAM pressure from CPU pressure before you start changing settings at random.

If a symptom still points both ways, line up memory growth with save timing in WS.log. A crash after steady RAM creep is a different problem from a repeatable hitch near one oversized base.

Soulmask server requirements FAQ

How much RAM does a Soulmask server need?

The official guidance is 16GB per game process, with one map equalling one process. In practice, a small fresh world can boot on about 11-12GB, which is why 12GB plans can work for private groups. The reason 16GB is the safer target is headroom for world growth, recruited tribesmen, saves and the known memory leak.

Is 8GB enough for a Soulmask server?

Not for a world you plan to keep. Soulmask hosts put the server at about 11-12GB just to start, so an 8GB plan has no headroom and tends to crash or refuse joins as soon as the world develops. Treat 12GB as the realistic starting point for a small group.

How many players can a Soulmask server hold?

The shipped default is MaxPlayers=20, and you can change that with -MaxPlayers. Hosts document a ceiling of 70 players per server, but that is only a slot ceiling, not a guarantee of smooth performance. Practical capacity depends much more on tribesmen AI, base size, world age and the CPU available to the process.

Why does my Soulmask server use more RAM the longer it runs?

Part of that is ordinary world growth, because older worlds hold more persistent state. Part of it is a known memory leak, which makes usage creep upward even with nobody online. That is why a daily scheduled restart is recommended even on servers that otherwise seem healthy.

Do I need a second server to run both Soulmask maps?

Yes, if you want both maps available properly. Each map is its own server process with its own RAM, CPU, ports and save files, and a cluster also needs a main server for account handling. In budgeting terms, both maps mean two full allocations, not one server with a light add-on.

More Soulmask and server sizing guides

Compare Soulmask hosts and dig into the hardware basics behind this guide.